


I'm Not Here to Say I'm Sorry

by Merixcil



Series: Advent Fics 2019 [4]
Category: Chernobyl (TV 2019)
Genre: M/M, Morbid, Old Age, Terminal Illnesses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-04
Updated: 2019-12-04
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:02:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26392327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merixcil/pseuds/Merixcil
Summary: Boris is settling into one of his last New Years, when Valery shows up drunk and ruins everything
Relationships: Valery Legasov/Boris Shcherbina
Series: Advent Fics 2019 [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1916806
Kudos: 6





	I'm Not Here to Say I'm Sorry

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: [That’s My Goal by Shane Ward ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWSfBggWBek)  
> 

Boris puts up the decorations for New Year rather early. It’s always been his favourite holiday, even when he was a child and it was just a celebration of another year spent on this Earth. The pine tree in the corner of his living room and the porcelain Father Frost on the mantelpiece used to be tied to a Christian festival, but that’s largely forgotten to him. He never had much stomach for religion, even if the State had permitted it. 

Why shouldn’t he stretch out the good parts of his life as far as possible? It’s not like he has all that much of it left to go. He drops heavily into his favourite armchair, and when he coughs he does so into a handkerchief already blood stained and tatty. It seems foolish to bother buying new ones, as does handing them over to the interchangeable maids that handle most of his personal matters for pummelling and bleaching, only for him to go and mark them up again in such a hurry. No. Better to leave them bloody. At least then he can track how fast he’s deteriorating. 

His duties at the Kremlin are ongoing, although the administration is starting to make concessions for him. Apparently he’s done such a good job managing the ongoing liquidation surrounding Chernobyl and Pripyat that he’s earned himself a lighter work load. They’re probably just scared that if he coughs too hard in their direction, they’ll catch his cancer. 

Five minutes at most from dozing off in his chair, the book he’s so determined to get round to reading with it’s spine uncracked on the table, next to the glass of cognac he’s only managed two sips from. Then the sharp, overloud buzz of the doorbell rings through the apartment and jerks him awake from any dream he might have been about to have. Boris swears under his breath, tense and ready to haul himself to his feet if necessary but loathe to do so if he can possibly avoid it. He is alone this evening, with no one to do the heavy lifting of shooing away whichever interloper thinks it might be their business to come snooping around his home once the sun has set. 

The bell rings again, loud and long. Boris should never have let himself be talked into getting the damn thing installed. It’s not like he’s going deaf, he could manage perfectly well with the old knocker. 

His back is starting to play tricks on him, trying to get him to stoop when he walks. Boris expends significant energy on a daily basis persuading it not to fall prey to ageing by allowing any significant kink to become permanent. It takes him a minute to fully straighten up, the buzzer shrieking ever more insistently the whole time. 

“Alright, I’m coming!” He barks towards the front door. But the walls in this building are thick, and there’s no way that anyone standing outside is going to hear him.

Despite having been out in it just a few hours previously, Boris isn’t ready for the rush of cold air that hits him when he pushes the door open. In a thin shirt and suit trousers, he’s not suited for it, so ushers the figure on his doorstep, buried under the seemingly mountainous folds of their coat, inside before he can get a good look at them. 

“What do you want?” Boris snaps, pushing the door closed. With any luck this will be quick and he won’t be expected back at his office within the hour. 

“I don’t know. I just…I couldn’t stay away.” The voice that emerges from the coat, and what Boris can now see is at least three scarves, is thin and reedy and filtered through the dense mass of wool that it’s owner is currently wearing. Familiar nonetheless. It’s not even been two years, though with the way the clock on his illness is running out, it’s hard not to view that stretch of time as half his life. 

Boris pauses, hand still on the door frame, and really looks at the figure in his hallway. All the clothes are new, because they would have to be. They only really got to see each other in the shadow of the reactor, and their flesh and blood were all they were allowed to carry back out into the sun. But the hat is rather similar to a favourite flat peak of his from back then, and Boris might have seen one of the scarves hanging in the hallway in all of the two times that he went to the man’s dingy little flat to pick him up when he was dragging his feet on matters the Central Committee demanded haste with. 

“Valery?” As soon as Boris has said it, he wants to run and hide. He thinks Charkov trusts him enough to not keep tabs on him outside of government matters, but it never pays to trust that the KGB won’t bug your home just because they can. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“Don’t.” Valery catches him before Boris can pull the door open, a single gloved hand coming to rest over his. 

It’s not an argument, it’s nothing at all. And Boris has no way to counter it. “What are you doing here?” He asks, keeping his voice cautiously low. 

One hand comes up to pull the scarves away, revealing the grim slash of Valery’s mouth, unwavering and straight, unwilling to concede an inch to joy or anger. His chin is peppered with thin hair, like he hasn’t shaved in a while but what grows through has turned patchy and insubstantial. So familiar and so unexpected. 

“I told you.” Valery shrugs, pulling at the buttons on his coat. “I couldn’t stay away.”

The layers come off in a rush, the gloves and scarves hung on the coat stand, the coat itself more or less thrown to the floor, the hat peeled back to reveal that what’s left of Valery’s ever thin hair is whispy and grey. Not even two years, and he’s turned into an old man. He stinks of alcohol, leaving Boris with no illusions as to why he picked tonight of all nights to break their state sanctioned embargo. 

But Boris doesn’t have the energy left to stop him when, having decided that his outerwear is successfully removed, Valery practically walks right into him, dipping his head to bury his face in Boris’s chest and slipping an arm around his waist in a vague approximation of a hug. 

“Valera.” Boris murmurs to the top of his head. “You can’t be here.”

“I can’t be anywhere.” Valery retorts, looking up at Boris, his eyes overlarge and watery behind their glasses. “I’m dying. I can’t go home. Can’t go to work. Can’t see you.” 

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.” Valery straightens up, but doesn’t quite step out of Boris’s personal space, his eyes resting uncomfortably intently on Boris’s face. “I’m dying. I don’t have much time left, and sitting alone this evening, all I wanted was to see a man I had a working relationship with for less than a year. How pathetic is that?”

“You should be out of the city. You should be with your family.”

“My family.” Valery snorts, but there’s no humour in it. “Please, Boris. I moved to Moscow young, and now they’re dead. I don’t have any family.”

Lonely old men the two of them, feeling the weight of the season to keenly. Boris can already tell that this is going to throw off his mood for the rest of the year, what little time that amounts to. He’d sort of assumed Valery was dead, or as good as. He has people who have sworn to report to him when the penny does finally drop, assuming that Valery is the first of the two of them to go, but it was easier to pretend. Valery crawled into the back of a KGB car outside a school converted into a courthouse in Pripyat, Ukraine, and somewhere between there and Moscow, he died. 

So the thing standing before Boris right now must be a ghost. “I missed you.” Boris tells him, before he can think better of it. In the aftermath of the words, he almost wants to cry. 

Valery nods. “I wish I’d known how hard this last part was going to be. I wouldn’t have done anything differently, I don’t think. But I would have liked to have known.”

“You wouldn't change a thing?”

“I don’t regret it, Boris.” Valery says, with a fierceness to his voice that brokers no argument. “I wasn’t going to, until I did. And I’m dying but I would be dying anyway and at least this way I don’t have to hate myself on top of everything else.”

The conversation is moving faster than Boris would have anticipated, not that he’s ever had much cause to anticipate how a conversation with Valery might go, after all this time. In the few instances in which he imagined that he might get the chance, he forgot how little restraint Valery has once an idea has caught hold of him, how he’s no build up and all action.

Of course he doesn’t regret it. Boris takes a step back and jerks his head for Valery to follow. “Come on, I’ve got some cognac open. You can stay for an hour, we can’t risk any longer.”

“Ok.” Valery agrees. “Ok, yes, you’re right.” He reaches for Boris’s wrist again and this time his fingers are warm and firm, finding their grip like they’ve done this a hundred times. 

They might have done this a hundred times, if they hadn’t been so paranoid about people watching them. In hindsight, it seems a silly thing to be so concerned with, what with the tiny invisible bullets pulverising their organs every second they had together. 

Still firing, back and forth between them. All the iodine in the world can’t stop them from being radioactive. Boris has just enough time to gasp in shock before Valery’s pulling him back and leaning up to meet him, pressing their lips together with purpose. 

It’s an awkward kiss, their lips too dry and the angle to sharp to make work properly. It lasts for all of a second, before Valery lets go and they fall back from each other. 

Boris should hit him for that, at the very least. He probably doesn’t have the balls to report any of this to Charkov, but he could take that much into his own hands. 

Valery takes a deep, shuddering breath. “No regrets?”

Lot’s. A lifetime’s worth. All coming to a head. Boris shakes his head. “Come on, we’re running out of time.”

Valery hooks their hands together, and follows Boris back to the living room to make the most of the New Year’s decorations and the good alcohol. Alone in the house, with no one breathing down their necks, and it almost feels like they're free. 

**Author's Note:**

> This work was originally posted as part of a multi chaptered 'advent fics' fic that I'm trying to split up. If you think you've read it before, you probably have
> 
> Comments on the previous posting of this fic (just ask if you want me to remove yours) include:
> 
> >Hotaru_Tomoe: Valery takes a deep, shuddering breath. “No regrets?”  
> >Lot’s. A lifetime’s worth.  
> >God, this line is so beautiful! I love the melancholy atmosphere of your story.  
> >>Merixcil: Thank you so much!


End file.
